


Fall Back Together

by natacup82



Category: Boy Meets World
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Female Friendship, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-07 17:49:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16858567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/natacup82/pseuds/natacup82
Summary: Three moments in the lives of Shawn and Angela, together and apart.We were built to fall apart,Then fall back together





	Fall Back Together

**Author's Note:**

  * For [atonalremix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/atonalremix/gifts).



> This fic follows the Boy Meets World’s canon timeline through the end of the series and then takes an alternative post-canon timeline that does not follow what may have been presented in Girl Meets World. My timeline is included in the endnotes.

_**2000 - Angela**_  
Angela spends her first week in Germany settling in with her dad. He’s rented a two bedroom apartment that’s halfway between the base and the university she’ll be attending so they’ll both be able to get where they need to go without trouble. They take a few days to get settled in but once that’s done Angela has a long summer stretched out in front of her and no real plans for how she’s going to pass the time. 

Her dad has to report for duty on base and Angela has no job, no friends and no plans for summer classes. She starts to lay this all out in an email to Shawn and Topanga but stops herself short. 

‘Shawn will want to tell me to come back and _not_ want to be the one to tell me to come back so he won’t reply at all,’ Angela thinks frowning at her laptop. ‘And Topanga will tell me to embrace the nothingness.’

Angela decides to embrace her lack of schedule or responsibilities, closes her email and pulls up a train schedule. She can get to plenty of other countries via the train and so she pulls out a notebook and starts making a plan. 

By the time her dad has gotten back from base Angela has a vague outline of what she wants to do with herself for the rest of the summer and has traded several emails with sample lists of day and weekend trips with Topanga. The last response was just a series of exclamation points and a copy of an article on the environmental benefits of train travel so she’s sure her plan is good.

“You look like you’ve had a busy day,” Angela’s dad says as he sets down his bag and gets a look at everything Angela has spread out all over the dining room table. 

Angela smiles. “Yeah, I don’t want to spend the summer sitting around doing nothing so I figured I’d spend some time exploring and we could do a few weekend trips a little farther out.”

“Makes sense,” her dad says taking a seat across from her at the table. “So what’s your strategy? You don’t know Germany yet so I assume some of this wandering will be local?”

Angela nods. “Absolutely. I’ve been emailing with Topanga a bit and we worked out a pretty good plan. I’m going to spend the next few weeks getting a feel for the town, my campus and the base. And navigating the train lines. Then I can do a few local day trips. In a month, give or take whatever your schedule allows we’re taking a weekend trip to France, then Spain, and then we can see what feels like a better choice, Amsterdam or Italy. I wanted to keep things a bit looser.” 

“I can work with that,” her dad says looking over her list and nodding. “You’ve got a really systematic approach to getting to know Germany; I like it.”

“Thanks,” Angela says, smiling. “I think this summer is going to be a lot of fun.”

*  
The next few months fly by; Angela travels all over Germany, some weekends her dad tags along but more often than not she’s on her own and skips over to tons of cities she never thought she’d get to explore. 

She trades emails with Topanga as she does her museum and bookstore tour of Europe. It’s great to share so much of this experience with her best friend but there are times when she wishes that Topanga was there to see it with her. 

Angela keeps emailing Shawn, when she finds a tiny, incredibly old bookstore in Munich or when she sees a very cool motorcycle in Italy but sometime in mid-June he stops responding. Topanga tells her she’ll talk to him and her dad tells her to give him time but it’s been two months, she’s starting school soon and the last email she got from Shawn was one word “cool”, in response to a long email about a bookstore she’d wandered into in Frankfurt.

They’re supposed to be friends, supposed to try to stay connected while they’re apart but Angela has been through this with Shawn more times than she wants to think about. He runs when his feelings get too strong, he pushes people away when things change and Angela is too far away to fight him on this _again_. 

At the end of September, after she’s settled in to classes Angela gives up. She can’t be the only person trying to maintain a relationship - it’s not fair to either of them. She emails Topanga the heads up that she still hasn’t gotten a response to her last email to Shawn from in August and tells her she’s going to reach out one last time before she’s done. 

_Hey Shawn,_

Angela starts, in what she hopes won’t be their last email. She goes back and forth on what kind of tone she wants to strike but then she looks at that last reply again; that one-word answer and she has to stop herself from writing something angry. 

_I’m hoping you actually read these even if you’ve stopped replying. I can't keep doing this one-sided thing. I don’t want to say goodbye but it feels like you already have so I guess I’ll just say I love you and maybe I’ll see you around when I’m back home. I hope you’re okay. If I don’t get a response I won’t be emailing you again._

_Angela_

He doesn’t respond and Angela gets on with her life, a little bit sadder but not broken. 

* 

_**2001 - Shawn** _

Shawn checks his email constantly as the semester winds down but the last email from Angela is still from last fall. 

He doesn’t exactly regret not replying to her earlier emails, he was too angry, too bitter, _too sad_ to say anything useful so he just stopped saying anything at all. And the longer he went the more ridiculous it seemed to even try to respond. 

Shawn opens Angela’s last email and reads it again, trying to find lines to read between but there’s still nothing. He knows she’s been keeping up with Topanga but he hasn’t heard anything about when she’s due to come back and he hasn’t exactly been excited to ask even with all of Cory’s not so subtle hints. 

He looks at the time, closes his computer and heads out to class. He’ll make a decision later.

Shawn still hasn't made a decision to email Angela by the time he’s done with classes and he’s mulling it over when he heads out to grab dinner with Cory and Topanga. They’re talking about something as he approaches but they shut up as soon as he sits down. 

“What?” Shawn asks, grabbing a couple of fries and dipping them in ketchup before stuffing them in his mouth. “Do I have something on my face?”

Cory laughs, that nervous awful laugh that he has when he’s trying not to talk about something. “What? No, no buddy you look great! Is that new gel?”

“No,” Shawn says, running his fingers through his hair. He doesn’t think his hair is doing anything weird, but the way Cory is acting is making him nervous. “Guys, what’s going on?”

Cory looks at Topanga, then at Shawn then opens his mouth and starts “okay,” before yelping and glaring at Topanga. 

“Violence is not the answer,” Cory says, reaching a hand under the table. Shawn assumes he’s rubbing his leg and that Topanga is wearing some very pointy, painful boots. 

Shawn looks at Topanga and raises an eyebrow. “Okay, seriously guys, what the hell is going on?”

“Have you talked to Angela?” Topanga asks, giving Shawn a look that makes him want to crawl out of his skin and disappear. 

Shawn shifts in his seat, fiddling with his watch. “Not exactly,” Shawn starts, shrugging. “I’ve been busy, you know how it is.”

“Exactly,” Cory adds, nodding. “We’ve all been very busy, lots to do, trying to get ready to be seniors, internships. All of that.”

Cory stops babbling at a look from Topanga. 

She turns back to look at Shawn and she doesn’t have that scary look on her face anymore, but the look now is almost worse. “I talked to her this morning. We scheduled a time to have a very long distance phone call because she had some big news.”

“Oh yeah?” Shawn asks, trying to sound disinterested as his heart races. 

“Yeah,” Topanga says, face not giving anything away. 

Shawn is sure he used to be better at reading her but now he doesn’t know what to expect so he’s bracing himself for anything. “She got into a really great summer abroad program. So she’s spending the summer studying Shakespeare in England,” Topanga adds looking at Shawn with more sympathy than needed. 

A summer is nothing compared to the last year. “That’s pretty cool,” Shawn says, slowly starting to warm to the idea of making a fresh start in a new school year. It’s not ideal; he wanted to spend the summer showing Angela how much she meant to him and making up for not contacting her but they can do that in the fall. 

“It is pretty cool, actually,” Topanga says, nodding but still giving Shawn that sympathetic look. And now Cory’s making the same face and Shawn knows that whatever she says next is going to be much, much worse. 

“But that’s not the only thing,” Topanga says. She reaches across the table and grabs Shawn’s hand. “Shawn, Angela isn’t coming back for senior year.”

Shawn blinks at her. And then blinks again. “What do you mean she’s not coming back? She was only supposed to stay a year!” 

Cory reaches over and starts rubbing circles on Shawn’s back; it would be soothing if he wasn’t shifting between anger and panic. 

“She’s decided it’s better to just finish up school in Germany with her dad instead of going to England, then back to Germany to pack up her life then coming back here and having things be awkward,” Topanga says, giving Shawn’s hand a squeeze. 

Shawn snorts. “You make it sound like it would be such a hardship, all of her friends are here.”

“Shawn come on,” Topanga says, letting go of his hand and sitting up back in her chair with a huff. “Having friends here would have made coming back easier but she was mainly coming back for you and you stopped talking to her months ago. There’s nothing here for her.”

“Honey,” Cory says, giving Topanga a look. “Maybe ease up a bit.”

Shawn shakes his head. “No Cory, she’s right. I screwed this up.” And he _knew_ that but it didn’t make it hurt any less. Would she be doing this summer abroad thing if he’d just responded to her emails or shown any interest in all the fun trips she was taking without him? He was never going to know, he sure as hell wasn’t going to ask _now_.

“You did,” Topanga says, all of the annoyance falling away. “I’m sorry, I know this isn’t how you wanted things to turn out.”

“But I didn’t do anything to make it turn out better,” Shawn says, shaking his head. “At least I know what not to do next time.” 

Cory smacks him on the back and says, “That’s the spirit. You just have to get back out there and fall in love again.”

“Yeah, sure,” Shawn says, flashing a brief smile that he knows is strained. He doesn’t really think there will be a next time, he can’t imagine letting himself feel like this about anybody ever again. It hurts too much but it’s definitely time to move on. 

*

_**2007 - Shawn and Angela** _

In May, Angela gets a job offer she can’t refuse. 

She’s found an apartment, shipped all her stuff and uprooted her whole life again to move to New York by the end of June. 

It’s weird to be living so close to so many of her college friends again, to really be a train ride away in the same time zone, on the same continent. 

She’s only been back in the states for three years, mostly living on the west coast while she finished her PhD. Angela hadn’t planned on staying on the west coast for so long, with her father in DC talking about retiring and her friends scattered across the east coast, but Stanford had her thesis advisor and a chance to teach so that’s where she’d stayed. 

Now she has a newly earned PhD, a studio apartment in Harlem, a job that starts in a month and a college best friend who’s pregnant with her first child; even for Angela, it’s a lot of change at once. 

She’s on her way out the door, heading to campus to do some reading for the syllabus she’s putting together when her phone rings. 

Angela looks at the display briefly, then swipes to answer the call as she steps out of her apartment. 

“Hey girl, can I call you back in like an hour? I’m just heading out,” Angela says, balancing the phone between her ear and her shoulder as she locks up. 

“Sure, I just need a teeny tiny minute right now,” Topanga says over the phone, voice tinny in Angela’s ear. 

Angela drops her keys into her purse, straightens up and says, “Okay, what’s up?” as she heads for the elevator. 

“I just wanted to give you a heads up; Shawn’s back in town,” Topanga says, pausing longer than necessary.

Angela rolls her eyes. “Okay,” Angela starts. “We’re all grown-ups, I can handle seeing my ex-boyfriend once in a while since our best friends are married and literally having a baby. It’s fine.” 

“Are you sure?” Topanga asks, voice lilting up with the question. “I don’t want things to be too weird but you guys had a weird breakup. And you haven’t seen each other in years but we’ve seen both of you, it just feels like it’s going to be weird.”

“It is gonna be weird,” Angela says with a sigh as she steps into the elevator. “I can’t lie to you about that. But we love you guys and we’re going to love this baby so we’ll have to get over ourselves and get through the weird stuff, okay?”

“Okay,” Topanga says. “You’re right, I know you’re right. It’s just.”

“You’re worried.” 

“I’m very worried. We just got you back for real, and he’s always running off out of town to do the next whatever and,” Topanga stops and sighs. “I want my kids to know you, both of you.”

“And they will because we’ll always be well prepared to see each other and our focus is going to be on you and Cory and this baby not on our stupid ten-year-old bullshit. Feel better?”

“Much better,” Topanga says with a laugh. “And now I’m going to let you go and I will text if Shawn is going to be here when you’re here, it’s not like you’re going to run into each other on the street or something.”

Angela laughs at that. “God, could you imagine? I’ll talk to you later,” And then she heads out to get to work. 

*  
Angela spends several hours working through her syllabus before making a quick run to the bank. She’s on her way out and thinking about stopping at one of the many non-chain coffee shops she passed on her way when she runs right into someone. 

“Damn, I’m so so sorry,” Angela says as the person steadies her and she looks up and sees Shawn Hunter for the first time in seven years. 

“Shawn?” Angela asks, stupidly unable to stop herself from questioning if it’s really him in front of her. She knows it’s Shawn, she’d know him anywhere but it’s like her brain and her mouth have stopped speaking to each other. 

“Angela, hey,” Shawn says, running a hand through his hair. “It’s been a while.”

“It has, how’ve you been?” 

“Good, good,” Shawn says, nodding. “I’ve been traveling, writing you know.”

“Topanga mentioned that you do travel writing? And photography, that’s great,” Angela says, voice lilting up in a question.

“Yeah, yeah it is. I’ve seen parts of this country I never even knew existed, it’s been cool,” Shawn says, with a shrug. “My therapist thinks I need to spend more time at a home base but that’s not really my thing.”

Angela nods. “I remember,” Angela replies and wishes that she could high five whoever got Shawn to willingly talk to a therapist. She’d suggested it after his dad died but he shut her down. 

“But it might be your thing eventually, there’s no rush. And I’m glad you’re talking to someone.”

“Me too, it’s been not good exactly but you know. Hey, listen-”

“So-” 

They both stop and laugh and for a moment it’s a little less awkward. 

“Do you want to get coffee?” Angela asks. “We could catch up and maybe get past all this awkwardness and blow Cory’s mind.”

Shawn laughs. “He has been freaking out about us running into each other at their apartment while I’m in town.” 

“I got a very anxious call from Topanga earlier today,” Angela says. “I feel like the universe has given us an opportunity to make things a little less stressful for our friends.”

He runs his hand through his hair again and says, “Maybe it has. And I’d like that. Getting coffee, I mean.” 

“Yeah, me too,” Angela says, with a smile. 

Shawn was one of her best friends, a fact Angela has spent years forgetting and she thinks maybe it’s time for both of them to try to remember. 

The coffee shop is only a few blocks south, so they walk - talking along the way and they keep talking, catching up on seven years of life and change, of moves across the country and the world. 

There are pieces that they both know about each other’s lives, things that have been passed back and forth from Cory and Topanga but it’s much less than Angela would have thought. 

Once they really get going it’s easy talking to Shawn, that’s another thing Angela had forgotten, how easy it was to just sit and talk to him. She’s completely lost track of time when her phone vibrates in her bag. 

“Sorry, sorry, let me just,” Angela says, reaching for her bag to turn off the alarm she set hours ago to keep her on track for the day.

Shawn shakes his head. “It’s not a problem, we’ve been in here forever.”

“We have,” Angela says with a smile as she drops her phone back into her bag. “But it’s been good. Even though I probably need to get going, I’m glad I almost knocked you down today.”

Shawn smiles. “So am I. I was kind of dreading seeing you again but it’s good, better than I expected.”

Angela laughs and shakes her head. “I‘m glad I exceeded expectations.”

“You always did,” Shawn says with a shrug, throwing Angela off balance. That’s another thing she can add to the pile of things she’d forgotten about Shawn, how he’d say something that knocked her off her feet like it was nothing. 

“Listen,” Shawn says, fingers drumming on the table. “Do you want to do this again? Maybe we can get coffee again and talk, catch up some more.”

Angela smiles. If anyone had asked her that morning how her day would go she could not have predicted it would have turned out like this. “I’d really like that.”

“Yeah?” Shawn says with a smile. “Cool.”

**Author's Note:**

> I spend more time than any of us need to discuss trying to figure out a timeline for these people only to write about 3 specific years in their lives. 
> 
> **Alternative BMW Post-Canon Timeline**  
>  Spring/Summer 2000 - Angela moves to Europe with her Dad, attends classes at the U of Maryland affiliated college near Ramstein AFB in Germany  
> Summer 2001 - Angela attends Pembroke-Kings Summer Program, decides to finish college in Europe  
> Spring/Summer 2002 - Everyone graduates  
> Fall 2002 - Topanga starts law school  
> Summer 2003 - Angela moves back to the states  
> Fall 2003 - Shawn moves to NY, then starts traveling  
> Winter 2005 - Cory & Topanga move to NY  
> Spring 2007 - Topanga gets pregnant  
> Summer 2007 - Angela moves to NY


End file.
